This week’s work consisted mainly of me working with the beast that is particle systems, yay for me! I definitely have a love-hate relationship with particle systems—I admire what can be done with them and acknowledge that most effects are made utilizing them, but man can they be finicky and temperamental to use sometimes. Funnily enough, I’d say that statement also describes my experience with said particle systems this week as I began to create the outer orb of the Scarlet Witch magic.

Thanks to some tips and tutorials given to me by my professor the week prior, this endeavor wasn’t nearly as intimidating as it could have been, and I had a pretty decent idea of how I wanted to go about creating this tendril-full orb of magic to radiate from my core. It all began with a sphere (big surprise there) to which I added noise for a new attribute I titled “emit”. I manipulated this noise with the goal of creating the tendril-like shapes that emit from the core of the orb, ending up with my sphere looking like this by the time I was done:

I then used an Attribute Wrangle node to make the values of my noise more highly contrasting, so that I could then blast away the emit values that were too low and only keep the most defined shapes to later emit my particles out of. After messing with the threshold values a fair bit, this is what the blasted sphere looked like:

We’ve got some nice and stringy tendril-like shapes going on, looking promising! Of course this noise was also animated, so each frame would produce a slightly different pattern so that the magic could come out looking more organic as it pulses outwards.

After this, I finally created and delved into the particle system, where I messed with the life expectancy and the rate at which it birthed particles to try and create a satisfactory shape. However, I very quickly realized that something was going very poorly when my first particle test looked a little something like this:

Certainly an interesting effect, but unfortunately I was going for a particle orb rather than a particle cylinder. After searching around, I realized that the main culprit of the issue here was the velocity of the particles, which seemed to end up all pointing in an upwards and right hand direction, rather than just straight outwards. I soon realized that the reason this strange velocity was being created was because I had transformed and moved my base orb to be my desired size and position in my posed model’s hand before creating the particle system, resulting in the velocity being thrown off by this movement. So, easily enough, I moved the transform node to the very end of my node line, making sure it was only being transformed after the particle system did it’s thing. A relatively simple issue to resolve luckily, but one I wanted to include since it feels like a mistake anyone could make and get stuck on.

After my newfound success in creating a well-functioning particle system, all that was left was for me to add some nodes to help determine the color of my orb, which I decided to create based on the emit value from earlier. This would allow for the highest concentration of color and opacity to be at the most densely packed parts of my outer orb, hopefully starting to form the tendrils I desired to create my overall shape. I actually did something similar to my core in order to refine the color and shape of the orb, driving its coloring by a ramp relying on its energy value. This made the most concentrated and subsequently the center part of the orb the brightest and hot-white color, allowing for the outside of the core to fringe off into reds and oranges to get a hint of color on the edges.

Also, speaking of the core, I was actually able to figure out my issue with the core size discrepancy from last week! Not alone of course, but with the help of my professor, we figured out that what was causing the core to suddenly enlarge in the Karma render view was in fact the pscale value I was using in the obj context. Essentially the pscale value was much too big, causing the core to become bloated from all the large particles it was being rendered with. Thankfully a relatively simple fix though, all I had to do was lower that value and we were back in business with a more accurately sized core!

Once I got all of these fixes and new additions finished, it was on to Nuke to continue playing with how to composite the magic to get the most effective look in my final product. I’m still definitely learning and re-learning Nuke, so there’s many things I think still need to be refined, but it’s definitely an improvement to the overall look from last week! The core is starting to really take shape and look as bright as I want it to, and though the outer orb still needs some more work and extra details, it does compliment the core well with the layered glows I was able to add.

As for the surrounding red flares and glows, I strengthened the intensity of them this week in an effort to make them more apparent, but part of me thinks I still need to tone it back just a little bit to get that perfect balance I’m looking for. Also, strange small issue: the red of the magic seems to shift whenever I export it out of Nuke? I promise when I’m working in Nuke, the color of the magic and lights is a much cooler red like my reference, but every time I export it, it ends up being much more warm and orange adjacent. I’m gonna look into that one, but if I can’t figure it out I’ll probably just need to make the red much cooler in Nuke than I would think to, in order to compensate for the increase in warmth when rendering.

But enough of me rambling on about little fixes I need to make, without further ado, here’s my finalized work in progress video for this week!

Here’s to hoping next week I’ll finally be able to refine the shape of both parts of the magic to my liking, it’s always those little details that will get you!